a. Technical Field
The present invention relates to catalogs of texto-visual records and more specifically, to generating and maintaining same.
b. Discussion of the Related Art
Texto-visual records constitute any type of data entity that includes at least one visual image of an object and at least one textual filed associated with the visual image. Groups of such records constitute vast amount of data and in order to be able to retrieve and search it efficiently, it is advantageous to store these records, after classifying them, in catalogs that exhibit either visual, functional similarity, or both between the records.
Classifying object images is known in the art and many algorithms for determining the level of visual similarity (or resemblance) of two given images are known and used. However, classifying object images merely based on visual similarity has many drawbacks, For example, these algorithms sometimes fail to determine hidden similarities in which the same object is shown in two images each taken from different angles or views. Additionally, these algorithms usually require a high level of computational resources.